Day 22 of 30 Day Challenge – Testing & Tracking

Friday, November 16th, 2007 at
12:10 pm

On day 22 of the 30 Day Challenge, Dan Raine focused on testing and tracking. He stated that, “Apart from good-quality market research, tracking is the single most important thing you should do as an internet marketer.” The difference between making money in internet marketing and earning an income in internet marketing is good quality tracking. Tracking shows you how well you are doing and is an early warning system.

Tracking Shows How Well You Are Doing

The only way to tell how well a product will convert is to test products against each other. If you are getting 40 or 50 visitors a day to your content page, then you’ll need to leave it up a week or two until you get 1000 – 2000 visitors. This will give you an idea of how well an affiliate product is doing.

Affiliate products sell in different ways. Some sell better over the weekend, some sell better during the week and some are seasonal. If you don’t leave the product up for a good sampling of time and visitors, then the data will probably not be strong enough to make a decision.

When testing a product against another product, then you should look at 1500 – 2000 visitors before making a decision about how well a product is doing. And if it isn’t doing particularly well, then switch to another one and test that. But make sure to have a decent enough sample to test and track.

In the whole process you should:

Measure how many people come into your content page using Google Analytics, Statcounter or other free service.

Measure the number of people who click out of your content page to your affiliate product. We call that the slipperiness. The more people who click out the more slippery the content.

Measure the number of people who buy the product.

The first way is to use Google Analytics or Statcounter to measure the number of people coming into the page. The second process, will allow you to measure the number of people who click out of that link to the affiliate product. Then use the affiliate’s tracking service to tell you how many people have actually made a purchase.

At least once a week, go over your stats and put all the numbers into a Google Spreadsheet. For each market you are in, track all the data for the week. If you think you can make a change or test another product, then test it out and see if you get a better result for that week. If so, stick with it.

Tracking as an Early Warning System

If you notice that the visitors coming through have dropped, the click throughs have dropped and the income has droped then you need to know why.

Two things could have happened:

The affiliate product might have changed. They might have changed the sales page and it’s not working anymore. You might need to flip to another affiliate product.

Your google rank may have dropped. Chances are someone else has come along and entered your market. Just look at your stats everyday and if you notice that there’s a drop of visitors coming through to your content page then you know there’s some kind of problem. Then go back to Google and check your position. Chances are you’ve been knocked off your spot by somebody else. If so, you need to give you content page some more loving.

With tracking and testing you can see these things as an early warning sign. As soon as you see the numbers dip then ask yourself, “Why are they dipping?” If it’s a trend like more sales on the weekend then that is fine. But, if on Thursdays you normally have 45 visitors and you’re only getting 6 then you know you’ve been knocked off your spot.

An early warning sign gives you a chance to recover, fight back and regain your position from your competitor. It’s a game we all play and your competitor will do the same thing. But your competitor will probably only knock you off your spot once. He’ll get number 5 and knock you down to 6 or 7. Then he’ll probably walk away and leave it and never come back to it again. That’s what most people do in the internet marketing game. They get comfortable with their rank and earning $8/$9 a day on a product. They then move on to the next thing. They’ll probably never come back to that page again. Testing and tracking will help beat most other internet marketers in the long run. But, you must actually take action and do it. If you do it now, you are one step ahead of most other internet marketers.